Muscat embracing the challenge

With a packed schedule ahead this summer, Melbourne Victory coach Kevin Muscat will implore his team to make the most of their opportunities.

The Hyundai A-League, AFC Champions League and FFA Cup campaigns could stretch Victory’s season to somewhere in the region of 40 competitive games.

“I’m not going to start getting into ‘a difficult one, because we’ve got Champions League’,” Muscat told SEN’s World of Football Program on Tuesday night.

“Because isn’t that where we want to be? We wanted to win trophies and we wanted to qualify for Asia and we’ve done that. We’re going to embrace it. You get a greater satisfaction of accomplishing something under great difficulty.”

The early stages of Victory’s pre-season are now underway. Although there are several signings still to be made, Muscat believes there’ll be just as much improvement to the squad coming internally.

“So much happens in an off-season. Not only do we try and improve our squads with reinforcements (and) players coming in, when we review you identify areas you think you can have some improvement,” Muscat said.

“Also, you look to improvement from within your own team (and) there’s a few names in our group. From within we’ll get a lot of improvement but there’s no doubt we’ll make some signings to reinforce what’s going to be a great campaign.”

Although Sydney FC will start as A-League favourites following their Premiership-Championship double last season, Victory’s focus will be on what they can control.

“Our measuring stick is going to be ourselves, we can’t dictate or control whether Sydney are going to be better or not, as good, or just as good as they were last year.

“But we can control and make sure that we’re better than we were last year, and we’ll see where that takes us.”